law. He explains, “If your yacht is registered in the Cayman Islands via a Cayman company and you are sitting in the USA, you probably don’t think you need to worry too much about employment law but you’d be wrong.” In fact, any yacht that spends considerable time on the French coast or has French based crew is subject to mandatory rules of employment law. Says Charlier, “That means that if there is a dispute between a crew member and an employer, the crew member can go to an employment tribunal, start an action of unfair dismissal and it’s fairly easy in France to go and arrest the yacht as security for your employment.” It’s Charlier’s job to defend the yacht owner from arrest and employment actions brought on behalf of the disgruntled crew member.


Sometimes you get a call from someone asking a lot of questions about VAT and some time into the conversation you realise that actually what they are interested in is buying a yacht!


Tom Kelly, Partner at Preston Turnbull LLP works mostly with yachts during the build stage or soon after. The most common concerns he deals with are; disputes over responsibility for particular aspects of a project or work done by subcontractors, delays in the schedule/delivery of a yacht, problems that arise after delivery in terms of quality or performance – especially where the yacht has agreed various items or arrangements, but


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does not get the quality it wanted or the owner has a change of mind, which can get expensive.


Charlotte van Steenderen at Mainport Lawyers deals with both transactional and dispute resolution work. She says, “Common questions and issues are in respect of the wording of letters of intent, build slot agreements and yachting construction agreements.” She gets asked things like: Is there any binding effect of the letter of intent? If so, to what extent are parties bound and which part is still open for negotiation? How do you deal with VAT on owner’s supplies? She’s also quizzed on shipyard bankruptcy and what to do if the yacht fails on achieving certain performance criteria (speed, noise and vibrations, range etc.).


Expert Edouard Mousny at Gordon Blair is asked a similar range of questions, working as he does from yacht purchase onwards. He says, “The most common concerns are in relation to, on the contractual side, the warranties provided by the Builder/Seller


ONBOARD | SUMMER 2021 | 89


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